Antony Jenkins today revealed his blueprint for a simplified Barclays that will include a much-slimmed investment bank where 7,000 jobs – more than a quarter of the staff at the division – are to be shed by 2016.

The investment bank will remain a core part of the Barclays group, as Jenkins, group chief executive, had indicated at the bank’s annual meeting on Tuesday, where he told shareholders the unit would be an “important part of the mix” in the group’s future shape.

Barclays said in a statement this morning that the changes would result in job cuts of roughly 7,000 at the investment bank by 2016 – roughly half the group-wide job loss figure of 14,000. The investment bank employed 26,200 at the end of last year.

The investment bank will in future, though, be focused on its banking, equities, credit and “certain” macro products. The group also confirmed plans this morning to create a so-called bad bank to house non-core assets that will be drained largely from the investment banking unit.

Roughly £90 billion of risk-weighted assets comprising “non-standard FICC derivatives, non-core commodities and specific emerging markets products” will be transferred to the non-core unit to be exited or wound down, together with £16 billion in RWAs as Barclays exits its European retail banking operations entirely, and £9 billion of other assets from the corporate, Barclaycard and wealth businesses.

The combined £115 billion of non-core assets is nearly double the £59 billion in RWAs already earmarked for exit as of the end of last year under Barclays’ Transform project, which was initiated by Jenkins soon after he took over as group chief executive.

Jenkins said: “There have been major shifts in the external regulatory and economic environment since February 2013, to which we now need to respond in order to meet our second objective: a sustainable return on equity above the cost of equity. While our objective is unchanged, we need to adapt our plans for how we get there.”

He added that the investment bank will account for “no more than 30%” of the group’s RWAs, as opposed to half currently, leaving the group less susceptible to volatility at the investment bank.

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The latest planned changes across the group will bring a further £800 million of costs, on top of the £2.7 billion costs to achieve the Transform programme's targets that were announced in February last year.